An Accurate Simple Harmonic Oscillator Laboratory - Comments

[Dr. Courtney]

Greg Bernhardt submitted a new blog post

An Accurate Simple Harmonic Oscillator Laboratory

Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

 

[Orodruin]

Requires students to be able to count to ten. Effectively unusable.

Just kidding. Even today it is a good experiment. Including tracking software into education needs to be promoted more. Back in high-school I did a similar experiment with a wheel and a VCR to prove to my teacher that the height of a point on the perimiter as a function of time was a sinusoid, not a cycloid (that’s as a function of horizontal displacement). I still recall going frame by frame.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

Including tracking software into education needs to be promoted more. Back in high-school I did a similar experiment with a wheel and a VCR to prove to my teacher that the height of a point on the perimiter as a function of time was a sinusoid, not a cycloid (that’s as a function of horizontal displacement). I still recall going frame by frame.

Agreed. With some careful experimental design, getting accurate results with Tracker is just so easy with little more than a video camera and a computer.